Losing my Costco virginity

Regular readers (if I have such a thing) will notice that my blog has had a little spruce-up. Much more friendly, me thinks. Feel free to let me know your thoughts - and I shall feel free to ignore any thoughts with which I don't agree!

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Last weekend, I had my very first Costco experience. Now, given that a lot of the visitors to this page are from the USA, home of mega-bulk-buying, that might not seem like a big deal, but here in Australia, Costco is still a bit of a novelty.

To put it in perspective, in the USA there are 416 Costco stores. In Australia, there is one. One single store to cater to the bulk-buy whims of the entire 20 million of us. So a visit to Costco is something of an experience.

I'd never had much interest in it before, other than a vague curiosity after hearing a rumour that you could buy a barrel of 1000 chupa-chips in it from there. But for some inexplicable reason, my Sister had bought herself a membership when the place opened a while ago, and she finally decided she wanted to use it. I was privileged enough to be dragged along as her 'guest'.


When we entered the car park, I started to have reservations. The place was jam-packed. We spent a good ten minutes trying to find a parking space. These reservations disappeared, however, once we'd wedged our car into a nearby crevice and I got my first glimpse of a Costco Trolley. They were HUGE! It was like someone had taken a regular trolley, fed it steroids to pump it up a little, then shipped it off to a bulk buy warehouse once it got too beefy to be sexy any more.

That was when I started to get excited.

We pushed our enormous trolley into the store and found ourselves standing in an aisle full of bulk-packaged sweets. That was it. That was the moment I realised I was in Heaven. Then I tried to move down the aisle and got bashed into by a swarm of other shoppers fighting for trolley space. That was when I realised I was in Hell.

Thus started two hours of good and bad. Tiny little joys - finding a half kilometre roll of baking paper; marvelling at 9kg tubs of washing powder; my sister impulse-buying a kilogram of processed American cheese slices - inter mingled with moments of overwhelming trolley-rage that would put any seasoned road-rager to shame.


The shoppers were a mix of Costco hardened parents bulk buying food and nappies, and excited sight-seers who were simply there for the experience and to exclaim over the amazing things you could buy in bulk.

At one point, we rolled our over-laden trolley down an aisle full of hardware. I paused in front of the biggest set of spanners that I have ever come across. Next to me a man had stopped to look at a set of saws.
'There's so many tools!' he exclaimed feverishly. 'I want to buy them all! I'm going to buy them all! And I don't even know how to use them!'


The biggest problem we faced was that when we first arrived, these bulk packs of food looked HUGE. But after an hour or so of getting lost amongst aisles full of oversized goods, things that were actually massive began to seem normal sized.

The danger in this was highlighted by our last purchase of the day - a fresh pizza, which we intended to cook as soon as we got home. We umm-ed and ahh-ed over it for ages, trying to decide if it would be big enough to feed four of us because it looked a little on the small size. When we got it home, it turned out to be so big that it wouldn't even fit in the oven.


My best purchase of the day, bar none, was this glorious, wonderful item:

That's right - 1.8kg of Jelly Bellys!

Anyone who has been reading this blog long enough knows that I have a serious Jelly Belly addiction. So having access to almost 2kg of Jelly Belly jelly-beans at a very reasonable price is not necessarily a good thing.

This is one of many reasons that I won't be hurrying back to Costco anytime soon. I think it's best to leave bulk buying to those of us with slightly stronger jelly-bean resisting will power.

Thank You GFC

I haven’t had much time to write over the last week, as I’m smack bang in the middle of the deadline for the Photo5 competition. Every spare minute has been spent thinking how I’m going to manage to make confetti look interesting, or how I’m going to translate a sound into a still image.

One thing I do have time to share is this:

Just posting this photo is making me drool.

How did I ever live without this before!?! It’s the best chocolate bar I’ve ever had. It’s like a Snickers bar without the chunks. And it has only been brought into my life because of the falling American dollar.


Now I know that the GFC is supposed to be a bad thing. It’s supposed to be causing a lot of problems. But it has also allowed me to discover a world of food that might otherwise have been beyond my grasp.
I should have guessed that American candy would be the best I’ve ever had – years of stereotyping should have told me that. How could they not be the best when the number one ingredient in their chocolate bars is ‘sugar’? Not chocolate, like it is in Australia, but sugar, followed by chocolate (whose main ingredient is also sugar).

And now that I’ve discovered this incredible, wonderful chocolate bar, I have to try others. I have to work my way through that entire imported candy shelf until I’m so hyped up on sugar that I’m shaking like a dodgy Elvis impersonator.

Thank you, GFC. You're good for the taste buds (if bad for the hips).

The things I don't know

Sometimes I’m surprised by the things that I don't know. It’s interesting that you can live for 28 years and not know about simple things that other people consider common knowledge.

For instance:
I am a total caffeine addict. I can’t function after 9am unless I’ve had my morning coffee, and a 3pm coffee gets me through those last, slow two hours of work. It’s been like that since I was about 18. So if we do a little bit of nerdy maths, we can estimate that I’ve drunk roughly 7300 cups of coffee in the last 10 years. About half of those would have been instant coffee, the other half barista made coffee.

And yet, after 7300 cups of coffee, I only discovered the existence of this nifty little doo-dad today:

It plugs up the hole in your coffee cup lid so that you don’t spill coffee all over your car! How is it that in 10 years of solid coffee drinking, I’ve never come across this before? And why is it that every single person I’ve told about it alredy knew they existed?

It amazes me. It also makes me wonder what other things everyone else knows that I don’t.

Smoking causes clarity

Sometimes, without warning, I have a desperate craving for a cigarette. Right now, I would kill to go outside, sit down and light up a cigarette. It would be a blissful few minutes in which I would forget my stresses and just enjoy the gloriousness of that smooth smoke.
The thing that stops me is the realisation that it probably wouldn’t go like that. It would be 5 minutes of me choking on smoke because it’s been so long since I had a cigarette, and then days of feeling grotty and wishing I hadn’t done it.

Still, it’s nice to imagine that I could just pop out now and enjoy a quick cigarette as much as I used to. It used to help me with decision making. I think the distraction of it all made me calm and I could think clearly. Right now I have some big work-related decisions to make and I keep thinking that maybe a cigarette might help me decide what it is I want to do.

On one hand, I have the option of staying in the job I’m in. It’s cruisey, it pays reasonably well, and I don’t have people harassing me all the time. It is, however, pretty boring, and my boss is kind of losing his marbles and can’t make a decision on any subject whatsoever that he will stick to.
On the other hand, I have the opportunity to start a job that is infinitely more interesting, has potential to move my career forward instead of being stalled like it currently is, but also means that I would have to work a lot harder for not a lot of extra cash. And it’s only part time, which means I either work (and therefore earn) less, or I work two jobs. That might not work out either, as it means getting my current boss to agree to a massive reduction in my working hours, which is a big risk. If I accept the new job, I might potentially lose 2 days of work a week, but I wouldn’t know that until after I’ve committed to the new job.

So I have a cigarette-demanding dilemma. My brain keeps telling me that the way to solve this problem is to fill it full of nicotine so it can calm down and see things clearly. My lungs, on the other hand, are screaming ‘No, No, No! Don’t do it! Have a drink instead!’ to which my liver is demanding that if I resort to heavy drinking, it might just start a Union and go on strike until it gets what it wants - or rather, what it doesn’t want.

So instead I’m just sitting here, thinking about how great a cigarette would be, and not really accomplishing much else.

An EBay Experience

I had my first EBay experience last week. Despite my super nerdiness, I’ve always resisted the urge to purchase on EBay - firstly because I am an addict by nature and I know that if I start, I’ll find it hard to stop; Secondly, because I’m spoilt and I like there to be a newness to my purchases. I like to be able to open an item and know that it has never been used before. That’s not to say that I’m opposed to second hand items, because I’m not. I just like the experience of unwrapping something new. It’s like a birthday present that I’ve bought for myself, but it can happen any time during the year. What can I say? I’m a big child. I LOVE birthdays.

The reason that I moved past these reasons and finally made a purchase was because I wanted to purchase something that has a totally unrealistic retail value. My new car has a USB connection and I wanted the manufacturer’s iPod cable so that I can control the iPod menu using my stereo buttons. Sadly, this tiny little cable retails for over $100. For a cable. Crazy! I wasn’t really keen on the idea of forking out that much money for a piece of wire, so I searched around to see if I could find somewhere else to purchase from, and eBay was the only result I came up with.

The fact that this item isn’t going to be purchased new is ok with me now, because I came to a realisation that negates all of the second-handed-ness.
This item will come in the mail. And not just the regular mail, but international mail. And if there is one thing as exciting as a present on an un-birthday, it’s opening the mail box to find a package that has travelled 12,000Km to reach me.

Passive Smoker

I miss smoking - a LOT. You would think that after 2 years of smoke-free air, I would be disgusted by the smell of cigarette smoke, but instead it makes me long for one more beautiful cigarette.

I am convinced that I have mild super-hero powers. I have an amazing and massive amount of will power and it's not normal. I should have given in to the urge to smoke by now, especially given that I don't really have any particular reasons for wanting to quit. I tried to think of a superhero name for myself, but anything that I put the word 'will' into just ended up sounding pervy. Even now, while I’m thinking about driving down to the shops and buying a pack of smokes, my stupid will power is telling me that i shouldn't do it.

When I’ve had a few drinks and my will power slides a teensy bit, I like to indulge in a good passive smoke. This usually involves placing myself directly in front of a smoker and inhaling their second-hand smoke while they look at me like I'm maybe just a little crazy. This usually serves as an intervention to stop me from actually smoking a cigarette - I realise that I'm so sad and addicted that it is embarrassing, and I put the idea of smoking out of my head.

I think what really keeps me from smoking is knowing that if I have one cigarette, I won’t be able to stop myself from having another. And then another, and another…

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – why are all the really enjoyable things the ones that are bad for you?